Who is Amanda Congdon, and should I care?

Until last week she was the host of Rocketboom - a daily technology "videoblog" started on October 26 2004, which by this month was attracting up to 300,000 viewers each day for a five-minute show that brought in varying amounts of advertising revenue.

But now Congdon has left the "show" after being presented, she told us, with an ultimatum under which she would no longer write, but would only be "the face of Rocketboom".

"It was totally unacceptable," Congdon, 24, told us. "I had been writing it and producing Jet Set [another videoblog]. I wasn't going to be demoted." And so Rocketboom, in which she owned 49%, but crucially her business partner Andrew Barron owned 51%, imploded.

Judging by the groans from around the blogosphere, many geeks can't imagine life without their hit of daily news about robot wrestling, today's cool gadgets and some amusing video footage spotted on the web. Of course, it helps if such items are fronted by someone young, female, with an infectious laugh and nice teeth who looks good even when constrained to a window 180 pixels across.

Rocketboom's crash has thrown an intense spotlight on the emergent area of "vlogs", or video blogs, which even had their own conference recently (see www.vloggercon.com). As an obvious outgrowth of text, audio and picture blogging, video blogging only has one problem: it's exceedingly easy to do badly and very difficult to do even slightly well - making even podcasting (which has surely brought more of what professionals call "dead air" to listeners' ears around the world than a century of radio) look like a cakewalk.

Thus it helped that Congdon had experience from New York's comedy clubs to lend some pizazz to her online act. (Arguments rage about who suggested she should spin in her chair to link items.)

Big budget it wasn't; the site featured in the New York Times last December, under the headline "TV stardom on just $20 a day". Congdon says that the site "periodically" made money, which would come in chunks and then dry up.

Still, making it only required a desk, a map of the world, a digital video camera, and some cheap or free video editing software. And it did manage to garner as big an audience as some niche broadcast TV shows; certainly there are plenty of British cable channels that would kill for some of Congdon's ratings. Or indeed Congdon herself.

The disappearance of the site has led bloggers to cast around for anything comparable and you can expect that the coming weeks will see plenty of videoblogs declared as "the new Rocketboom" - only to be dismissed as "last week's new Rocketboom" just as quickly.

Meanwhile, Congdon's ambitions now lie on the other side of the US, in Los Angeles; earlier this week she said that she was sorting through hundreds of offers presenting shows in different formats. "In five to 10 years ... I'd see myself doing some kind of hybrid show that crosses TV with videoblogs," Congdon told us.

"I'd like to bridge the mainstream media to the internet, if I can find a partner that's financially stable."

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